le he, who seemed to have so much more reason for wanting
the very knowledge that they were obtaining, could not settle his mind
to his lessons. Jane was beginning to read French books for her
amusement in leisure hours; and Agnes was often found to have covered
two slates with sums in Practice, just for pleasure, while he could not
master the very moderate lessons Miss Harold set him. It is true, he was
two years younger than Agnes: but she had known more of everything that
he had learned, at seven years old, than he now did at eight. Hugh began
to feel very unhappy. He saw that Miss Harold was dissatisfied, and was
pretty sure that she had spoken to his mother about him. He felt that
his mother became more strict in making him sit down beside her, in the
afternoon, to learn his lessons for the next day; and he was pretty sure
that Agnes went out of the room because she could not help crying when
his sum was found to be all wrong, or when he mistook his tenses, or
when he said (as he did every day, though regularly warned to mind what
he was about) that four times seven is fifty-six. Every day these things
weighed more on Hugh's spirits; every day he felt more and more like a
dunce; and when Philip came home for the Midsummer holidays, and told
all manner of stories about all sorts of boys at school, without
describing anything like Hugh's troubles with Miss Harold, Hugh was
seized with a longing to go to Crofton at once, as he was certainly too
young to go at present into the way of a shipwreck or a battle. The
worst of it was, there was no prospect of his going yet to Crofton. In
Mr. Tooke's large school there was not one boy younger than ten; and
Philip believed that Mr. Tooke did not like to take little boys. Hugh
was aware that his father and mother meant to send him to school with
Philip by-and-by; but the idea of having to wait--to do his lessons with
Miss Harold every day till he should be ten years old, made him roll
himself on the parlour carpet in despair.

Philip was between eleven and twelve. He was happy at school: and he
liked to talk all about it at home. These holidays, Hugh made a better
listener than even his sisters; and he was a more amusing one--he knew
so little about the country. He asked every question that could be
imagined about the playground at the Crofton school, and the boys'
doings out of school; and then, when Philip fancied he must know all
about what was done, out came some odd remark